An Affair to Remember: Julia Goldani Telles

It's almost like being in a prologue, the story before the story of the young actress whose name everyone knows. Right now, Julia Goldani Telles is a student at Columbia. Every Sunday on Showtime her porcelain doll face appears on the buzzed-about TV show now in its second season, The Affair.

For her BAZAAR.com fashion shoot, Telles has been tasked with becoming a bored, grown-up Eloise rolling solo at The Plaza after hours. All willowy, dancer movements and Meisner-worthy emotional impulses, Telles transforms herself in front of the camera by the second. This misunderstood Eloise is not far off from her character on the show, Whitney, the naïve, beautiful Brooklyn teen with a penchant for histrionics escalating to a high-pitched shrill when things don't go her way. And they rarely do.

"To me, Whitney is a very complicated, fearful and driven girl. I told somebody the other day that she has equal parts fear and ambition because she's constantly on this tipping scale—she's so afraid, but she wants so much and she's so self-righteous," Telles explains. "I think she's constantly trying to figure out when to lash out, when to hold back. And I sometimes call her Hurricane Whitney because she feels like a ticking time bomb."

Telles has the kind of urban legend Hollywood fairytale start that draws would-be actors to La La Land—she booked a job her first time out. "I went in and I auditioned for a TV show that I got because I didn't know what an audition was, so I wasn't scared," Telles recalls. The show was the short-lived, raptly followed ABC Family dancer drama Bun Heads, created by Amy Sherman Palladino.

Landing the role was due in part to Telles' long background as a ballerina. She explains that what began as a childhood fluke—"my parents just put me in ballet because it was cute. I wore, like, a hairnet and it was hilarious"—quickly became a subject of dedication—"I think I had a lot of energy and I didn't really know where to put it—that kept me in ballet, which was just a really fun way to channel all the emotional and physical energy that I had."

An injury sent the then-16-year-old from the ballet studio to the proverbial stage. "I took an acting class and I really liked it—and it's so different than ballet. It uses a completely different side of your brain. There are more gray areas—there's less of a way to be right and wrong, so I really liked that."

Telles, now 20, grew up between Rio de Janeiro, LA, and New Jersey. "My parents were gypsies," she quips, before explaining their actual jobs as sociology professors, her current area of study. The subject is one that she sees as paralleling her chosen profession, "it gives you a lot of context in terms of what the world of a story is, or what the social moment is, or what the social interactions mean in a larger context, and what power dynamics look like, and what relationships in families look like from a more statistical perspective."

"I can use my own experience all I want, and things I've seen, but knowing the larger fact of how humans work, and how things that have been tested about how people work, is just a really big added bonus," she says.

But it's not all character study, and the dynamic of living in two worlds can be complicated, she admits, "It's hard explaining to your teachers when you need to, like, 'I'm so sorry, I worked like 38 hours this weekend,' and they're like 'What are you talking about?' So they don't really take excuses like that. I've had to kind of suck it up."

Right now it's all about living in duality—as a student and thespian ingénue. "I should audition more than I do…because I'm in school I'm really, really selective about what I audition for. But I go in on stuff now and I still get really nervous. I think that the goal for me in the coming year is to just really put myself out there and get used to it—because it's kind of a sport. You have to get used to it, your body has to get used to being that nervous," she explains.

In the meantime, she's putting herself out there, using social media tentatively and judiciously, "I think the way to put it is like, I don't want anybody to know anything about my life, and nobody is trying to know anything about my life, which is great."

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